From Alistair Crowely to Hawkwind and Punk Rock – Gary Lachmann Blondie founder member turned writer on the Esoteric

“Worship me with wines and strange drugs whereof I shall tell my prophet, and be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all!” proclaimed The Book of the Law. Six years after it was written, Crowley introduced psychedelics to Europe, with a sacrament of mescaline in his 1910 staging of the Rites of Eleus in London. It was a kind of prototype of the rock band Hawkwind’s epic Space Ritual of the early 1970s. Both comprised music, dancers, poetry, hallucinogens, and, in Hawkwind’s case, projections and strobes they turned on themselves as well as the audience.” From the Gaurdian review of “Beyond Belief ” on the legacy of Alistair Crowley